Trash Talk

The two unavoidable consequences of existence—death and taxes—are cartoon staples, sometimes in the same cartoon.

A third, much more mundane inevitability is garbage. The other day, on the sidewalks of post-blizzard Manhattan, it was easy to accept the premise of this James Stevenson cartoon—that humans could not possibly be responsible for all of the piles of big, ugly, black bags.

Annoying as it is, the very quotidian nature of trash means it is rarely in the news. Every once in while, however—when there’s a garbage strike, for instance—it grabs headlines. It also spawns jokes like the one where the guy is told there is a garbage strike and replies, “Does that mean we can’t get any more garbage?” And then there’s the apocryphal anecdote about New Yorkers getting rid of their garbage during the strike by wrapping it in Christmas paper and leaving on the front seats of their unlocked cars.

While taking out the topic of this blog the other day, I picked up the New York Times and saw that garbage was once again making news, right up there with Facebook being valued at fifty billion dollars.

And looking down at that huge pile, what I then saw when I visited my local newsstand was entirely credible.

All this reminded me that garbage bags were on my shopping list for that day:

So off to the supermarket, where I’m usually bumfoozled by the plethora of product choices. No exception there when it comes to garbage bags.

In the end I went with Hefty because of the better branding. Look, “Glad” is a ridiculous name for a garbage bag and “Trash” is for people who would name their male child “Boy.” Besides, I’ve always found Hefty to be the best at storing the vast amounts of capital I’m accumulating to invest in Facebook.